Deb Baker - Ding Dong Dead

“Of course not,” Nina said.

Gretchen remembered Flora’s metal-head doll and her travel trunk. “One more thing,” she said. “I have a picture.” She found it in her purse and handed it to Nora. “Flora’s doll trunk fascinates me. Do you know how she got the travel stickers? Did she really visit all those wonderful places?”

Nora got up and took the picture over to her mother. “That’s Flora. The memories this picture brings back!” Bea said. “Mr. Swilling, Flora’s father, was an archaeologist. He traveled to foreign locations to participate in digs and always returned with stickers.”

That explained the exotic locations represented by the doll trunk’s stickers. Cairo, Jericho, Rome. Cities with important archaeological significance.

“Did you find Mr. Swilling’s rock collection in the house?” Nora asked.

“No,” Caroline said. “But we found the doll Flora is holding in the picture.”

“If I were you,” Nora said, “I’d stay away from anything having to do with that family. The house and the family, if anyone’s left, are cursed.”

“Really?” Nina said, showing more interest than previously. “A curse?”

“She meant that figuratively, Nina,” Gretchen said. They didn’t need a ghost and a curse. She shot her aunt a warning glance and projected out, No ghost stories, please.

It didn’t matter whether or not Nina picked up the unspoken signal to refrain from telling her own ghost theory, because Nora stood up, signaling the end of their conversation.

“Go home now,” Bea whispered, appearing more shrunken than ever. “You’re pretty girls. You don’t want to be next.”

Gretchen and Caroline worked side by side at one of the library’s computer workstations. Expanded search strings had failed to produce information on Richard Berringer.

Caroline typed in a search string. Insane asylum patient lists.

Thousands of pages of records came up for institutionalized patients throughout the country.

“This is going to take days,” Gretchen said, scanning page after page. “And we can’t be sure his records were ever computerized.”

“And once we find the records, they won’t give us information about the present. We still won’t know where he is.” Caroline rubbed her neck. “The best we can hope for is a better understanding of mental disorders, so we know what we’re dealing with. Here it says that the Insane Asylum of Arizona dates back to the 1800s. Thousands of patients were committed to it against their will. But then during the human rights movement, a bill was passed. It stated that a person had to be dangerous to themselves or others to be confined.”

“Before that, no one needed a reason to commit another person?”

Gretchen was shocked at the facts regarding sanatoriums, at the absence of any kind of patients’ rights. She was developing a new appreciation for how much society had changed in regard to mental health laws.

Gretchen pulled up a lengthy list of patients and their diagnoses from an asylum that had been located on the East Coast. Insanity conditions, according to the charts, ranged from hallucinations to dementia, incoherency to delirium of grandeur.

“Delirium of grandeur?”

“Same as delusions of grandeur. In my day,” Caroline said, as though she were an ancient artifact, “families could band together and institutionalize another family member. It was a convenient way to remove dangerous people from society, whether the threat was perceived or real. If your relatives thought that you might harm yourself or someone else, off you went. Of course, some people took advantage of the law and abused their power. Patients were sent away because they were afflicted with diseases or had certain disabilities that their families couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with.”

“I can’t imagine our society allowing that to happen,” Gretchen said.

“But we did. The mentally ill could be placed in a facility and abandoned forever,” Caroline said. “The laws eventually changed, thank goodness, and people could no longer be institutionalized against their will. Over time, the insane asylums closed. Many are abandoned buildings to this day.”

“What happened to a released patient after the new laws were passed?” Gretchen asked.

“They rejoined society the best they could. Many were released in downtown Phoenix to fend for themselves. Social service agencies that could have rehabilitated patients for re-entry into society didn’t exist. Some of the released patients’ families would have taken over the responsibility of caring for them. Some must have become homeless.”

Gretchen leaned back and rubbed her weary eyes. “Mentally ill patients were abandoned on the streets without professional care. One of them could have been Richard Berringer.”

“That’s right. Or one might have been Rachel, based on what Nora and Bea told you.”

“But she’s dead. We need to find out what happened to him.” The task was monumental. If they had weeks maybe, but they didn’t.

After a few minutes of contemplating the Berringer family time lines, Gretchen opened the notebook she had carried while canvassing the Swilling neighborhood. She began drawing a simple sketch of a family tree, constructing branches and filling in dates of births, deaths, and disappearances. Information from the Swilling gravestones helped, but most of the doodles were Gretchen’s assumptions.

She drew a tiny question mark next to Flora’s name, then, remembering what Matt had told her, crossed it out and wrote the year the woman had vanished: 1981. “We can assume for now that she was murdered close to or on the day she disappeared,” she said to Caroline, who had stopped searching to watch her daughter work.

“She disappeared in the early eighties,” Caroline said. “At a time of social change, when patients in the sanatorium were being released. We don’t know that Richard was still in an insane asylum when the laws changed.”

“But the dates fit.” Gretchen looked at her simplistic effort at charting a family’s history.

Richard Berringer, Flora’s son, could be the killer. But would he have murdered his own mother? And what about Allison Thomasia? Did he kill her because she came too close to the truth behind his missing mother?

She could imagine the scenario.

The Berringer family’s son Richard was mentally ill. He might have had many issues, an established pattern of violence. The family had to deal with his problems once and for all. Prison or an asylum? Which would be worse? They made a choice. He remained in a sanatorium for years. Then changes to the mental health laws put him out on the street without follow-up treatment for his condition and without a place to live.

After that, his mother disappeared.

Did he return for revenge and kill her, leaving her decaying body in the armoire?

If an enthusiastic family genealogist showed up asking questions, delving into his past, he might have arranged to meet her at the cemetery. He might have murdered her.

Everything made sense.

If Allison found Richard and told him of her plan to search through the family’s past, that meant he was near, close enough to lure Allison into the cemetery to silence her forever.

Richard might be living under an assumed name. Or he could be one of the homeless that Gretchen had seen at the rescue mission or at the soup kitchen.

Richard Berringer could be anyone.

Caroline’s phone rang, interrupting Gretchen’s thoughts of murder. Her mother, immersed in reading an item on the Internet, handed it to Gretchen without looking at the caller ID.

“We went to pick up the dogs from your house,” Nina said. “A cop stopped us outside. Then your honey showed up.”